Ascension is a term I learned from my mentor Perry Marshall. The root word ascend, is a verb meaning to rise or go up. In this situation it refers to how you, the business owner or advertiser, move customers from lower cost, less profitable products or services to higher cost, more profitable ones. If it isn’t immediately obvious why I suggested you read this post, please continue reading and I think it will become clear.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to review many AdWords accounts for prospects that are in hyper-competitive markets. Markets where the profit margins are thin, competition is stiff and the products or services could be described as commodities. This is especially true when the business is acting as an online distributor for a relatively inexpensive, branded product using an e-commerce website.

In this scenario, you not only need a highly optimized AdWords account, but a website and fulfillment process that leaves no room for error. I won’t digress into the topic of conversion optimization because that isn’t the point of this post. But let me get your attention by saying you can have a highly optimized AdWords campaign, a great landing page with all the right attributes, a great fulfillment process and even a decent conversion rate, and still be significantly out-performed by the competition. And when I use the term “out-performed”, I’m not referring to things like impression share, number of visitors, CTR, conversions or even sales. Those are just leading indicators to your ultimate objective, which is profitability.

I’ve talked with several online marketers over the years, some who have been selling online longer than I have been consulting in the online space, which is over ten years. They began using their website as a way to establish an internet presence, essentially creating an online brochure. Then they began implementing e-commerce and optimizing their website for the purpose of SEO, SEO being the first form of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Then as the internet became mainstream and in many cases being the medium of choice, they began using PPC to increase exposure and ramp-up faster than they could respond with SEO.

However, these advertisers didn’t understand that PPC is quite different from SEO. See my article titled PPC vs SEO. They didn’t understanding The PPC cost model. That’s because SEO works well for products and services where the traffic is high and conversion rates are relatively low, where a lot of shopping takes place. On the other hand, this is a formula for disaster with PPC, unless you have an ascension business model where you can afford to just break-even or perhaps even lose money on the initial sale. Where you have a longer-term view than a single sale and take into account the lifetime value of a customer.

The classic business model for this is known as the Gillette theory, where you escentially give away the razor because you actually make your profit on razorblades. Another example is the car dealership industry. Many car dealers actually lose money on the sale of a new vehicle because they make it up with profits from their service business over the life of the customer relationship.

Now let me move on to the point which is the purpose of this article. If you are promoting a product or services using PPC and you have done a good job optimizing your AdWords campaign, landing page, website and fine-tuned your offer, and still struggle to make an acceptable profit, ask yourself the following question. “Do I have an ascension model?”. “Does my competition have an ascension model?” Because if you don’t and your competitor does, PPC may not be a viable channel to promote your business.

I make this claim realizing that there is a good chance there is still room for improving your AdWords account and website. However, I’ve seen too many accounts where the advertiser was beating their head against the wall or lambasting their PPC account manager, thinking the solution to their AdWords ROI problem was simply making some feature or function change in AdWords. They were simply barking up the wrong tree.

When a PPC advertiser has a viable ascension business model, they can afford to drive the bid price up to the point where it becomes unprofitable for competitors who need to make a profit on every sale. It makes PPC an unprofitable channel for the single-sale advertiser. This is why it’s important to study your PPC competitors as part of your online advertising strategy.

Often times what I conclude from analyzing a client’s PPC account and the competitive landscape, is that a hybrid model is possible. Meaning the client can only afford to advertise certain products. The products or services that have enough profit in them to make the numbers work. A variation on this strategy is to only bid on those keywords where the competition isn’t as strong and the CPC is lower. This means they can only afford to go after prospects that are earlier in the sales cycle by using generic keywords verses those that are indicative of someone ready to buy.

The key to making all this work is to have a good handle on your key metrics. In particular, your cost per conversion. If you don’t have accurate and reliable conversion tracking and web analytics data to work with, you have an even bigger problem on your hands!

Google’s definition of broad-matched keywords says it will display your ad for “singular or plural forms, synonyms, stemming (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations”. The most significant word in this definition is the word synonym. That’s because it’s the most powerful and also the most dangerous.

Synonyms give Google a tremendous amount of latitude to display your ad and you will be shocked to learn who Google has shown your ad to. What’s even more disheartening is to know that users searching for these seemingly unrelated search terms, actually clicked on your ad. To see what I mean, you should run a search term report. But even that does not tell the whole story because it does not contain all the search queries for all the impressions where your ad was displayed or all the search terms for all of the clicks you purchased. Nevertheless it is quite telling.

There are two points I’d like to make in this post. When you use broad-match keywords:

You get clicks for a fraction of what you would pay if you targeted that search query with a more restrictive keyword match type and

Your ad is displayed for search terms that you could not target any other way.

The analogy I use is that it’s like buying carpet remnants. If you carpeted your entire house with carpet remnants versus a specific style and color of your choosing, you could do it at a fraction of the cost. While you may have had several impressions and clicks for a specific search query you really like, your ad was only shown for a fraction of the time (Impression Share) it was able to be shown for that same search query. That’s because every search query is an instantaneous auction and Google displays ads to maximize their profit potential. The fact that your ad was displayed for those auctions means Google couldn’t find any other ads to display that were potentially more profitable than yours. Therefore, you got a real bargain. But don’t expect to get that same bargain every time that same search query is used. If you do want to display your ad for that search query a lot more often, you must use a different keyword and match type and bid considerably higher.

Targeting low-volume search queries can be difficult, even impossible if you want to achieve a higher impression share. See my post titled The keyword conundrum.

One of the most common occurrences I see when reviewing a client’s AdWords account, is that the keywords, and often the ad copy, is too broad in terms of who is able to see their ad. This means the advertiser’s ads are appearing for relatively poor quality users, which drive up the number of impressions, and results in poor quality visitors (clicks). This produces a less than optimal account performance and ROI.

At its core, the issue is that the novice AdWords advertiser doesn’t understand how keyword matching options work. In fact, many advertisers don’t even know what they are. This is particularly relevant in cases where the advertiser has a preponderance of broad-matched keywords. Depending on your AdWords proficiency, you may find my article titled The broad match effect particularly enlightening.

Choosing the right keywords, matching options, ad copy and landing page, all have to do with how aggressive you want to be in using AdWords and how much effort you want to put into optimizing your campaigns. Here again, it all comes down to ROI. And one particularly important metric in the ROI calculation will be the lifetime value of a new customer. See my article titled PPC essentials and pay particular attention to what I call the tactical triangle.

When I describe the two most important skills I bring to our relationship, I say it is: 1) a deep understanding of Google AdWords and 2) the mindset of visitors from search engines and display ads. If you have a good sense of how visitors from search and display think and how they are likely to act, you are able to make some important decisions about who should see your ad and who shouldn’t. How you implement your decision has to do with knowing how keyword matching options work.

The process of determining who sees your ad is often a collaborative decision made between me and the client. I am usually not familiar enough with the client’s business and there will be terms that require the client’s perspective. But that alone isn’t enough. I usually have to explain to the client, the subtle nuances between seemingly equally relevant keywords and search terms. In the absence of clear and compelling conversion data, it comes down to probability theory. What are the chances of converting this visitor verses that visitor? And while I may offer an opinion on specific keywords, it is the client who makes the final decision.

Quite often, I need to explain to the client that there will be more traffic available than they can afford to purchase and therefore, we need to make some important decisions about who sees their ad and who doesn’t. This is particularly relevant in the case where Google is indicating that the campaign is “Limited by budget”. That almost always means that the client is spending some amount of their daily budget on relatively poor quality visitors and experiencing the very real possibility that their ad is not being shown when their best prospects are searching! It’s important to note that when Google displays the Limited by budget warning, not only will your ads stop running at some point, but Google will also be displaying your ad intermittently before it stops running altogether.

When it comes to analyzing the historical data in your account or using a keyword tool or constructing your own keywords, it’s important to ask yourself, “is this user looking for information or a product / service?” I think it’s safe to say that if you are running an AdWords campaign, you probably are not in the business of selling information; you are trying to sell a product or service. Therefore, keeping your focus on users searching for a product or service is very important. If you still have room in your budget after you have that base covered, then I suggest you have a separate campaign for users looking for information.

Let me illustrate by providing an examples using my own AdWords campaign. If I were to use the keyword “Google AdWords management” for example, it would be too broad because it can mean many different things besides consulting services; such as an automated tool, a book or training course. Therefore, all my keywords have words in them that imply some kind of professional help, meaning they expect to spend money! Words like consulting, expert, professional or specialist.

Users searching for information may be good suspects, but not necessarily a good prospect. They will typically be higher in the sales funnel and won’t convert at a rate that compares with those searching for a product or service. Your first priority should be to focus on keywords that are indicative of prospects that are lower in the sales funnel. In other words, closer to making a buying decision. Once you have optimized your account for those keywords and if you have any budget left over, then you can consider buying clicks for information seekers. This could be considered your branding campaign. It’s just something you do because you feel it will have a long-term positive effect, much like a billboard on a busy highway.

Here is a tip to improve ROI. Once your primary campaign reaches its daily budget and you decide not to increase your daily budget, consider running your ads only on Google.com and not their search partners. That’s because Google.com has the highest quality traffic and your Analytics data and quality score are more accurate there than on the partner sites. To get a sense for how your existing campaign is performing, in the Keyword view, use the Segments tab and select the Network. Then compare the performance on Google search verses Search partners.

Here is another interesting reality when it comes to search engine advertising. Users of search engines don’t read ads! They only scan them. If your ad appears near the top of the search results page, chances are, you are paying for a lot of clicks that delivered relatively low quality visitors, especially if you have keywords that tend to be broad in scope. A quick review of your search term data will bear this out, which is all the more reason to be prudent in terms of who sees your ad. The sad truth is that many users blindly click on the top listings (organic or paid) and then determine if the website has what they were looking for. If they don’t like what they see, they simply hit the back button and repeat the process.

This is a great lead-in for another bit of search engine advertising trivia. The further down the search results page your ad appears, the higher the quality of visitor you get. Why, because when your ad is further down the page, users actually read the ad! This is one reason why I never intentionally want any of my ads to appear in a position higher than #3. And for some keywords, I intentionally want to be lower than #6. Why, because it’s all about ROI. How many clicks do I have to buy to get a prospect? If I know it will take more clicks of a particular keyword to get a prospect, I bid lower for that keyword.

Ad copy also plays an important role in the ROI equation. Your ad needs to be highly relevant to the user’s search query, the keyword that triggered your ad and the landing page you send the visitor to. If it isn’t, you not only pay more for the click, but you will probably get a relatively poor quality visitor. Your ad should be relevant, compelling and transparent. By transparent I mean it needs to be clear about what the user will see if they click on your ad. For example, if you sell relatively expensive widgets. Then you should have wording in your ad that indicates you offer premium widgets or top quality widgets or widgets priced from $x. Do you remember what my ad looked like? I say in every ad I run: “$100/hr“.

The challenge some advertisers face is they simply can’t make the numbers work for their AdWords campaign. They have to spend more money on click charges and other related costs, than they make from a lead or sale. There simply isn’t enough profit in the sale of their product or service to off-set the costs associated with developing and managing an AdWords account.

This sometimes happens slowly, over time. Advertisers that began using AdWords several years ago, when there were far fewer advertisers, much cheaper clicks and AdWords was a lot simpler. These advertisers are now finding it difficult to compete. Years ago, you may have been able to sell a $20 item to a one-time buyer, but not today.

Having a PPC campaign means you have now entered the world of “online direct marketing”. And while PPC is the fastest and most flexible form of direct-response marketing ever invented, it still conforms too many of the marketing industry’s statistical averages that have proven out over the last 100 years.

Unless you have unusual circumstances, you should expect a “conversion rate” of around 1-4%. That means about 2% of the visitors to your site from a PPC campaign will take “the desired action”. The desired action can be any one of a number of things, such as; filling out your contact form, signing up for your newsletter, downloading a special report, calling you on the phone or perhaps buying a relatively low-cost item. These are actions a visitor from a search engine will realistically take within 30 – 90 days. I use 30 – 90 days because that is how long AdWords tracks a visitor after they click on your ad. But in many cases, the desired action only produces a lead, not a sale. Once you have the lead, you then need to convert it to a sale. Conversion rates from a lead to a sale are typically 20-50%.

I want to emphasize that there can be a wide variation in what is considered a conversion and not all desired actions can be recorded using Google AdWords conversion tracking. However, if you do register actions as conversions in AdWords, remember that conversions can be registered in AdWords up to thirty days from the date of the last clicked AdWords ad.

Another challenge that confronts novice PPC advertisers is when the most desired action is a phone call. That’s because a phone call cannot be easily tracked and reported in AdWords. This presents at least two problems. 1) You lose the ability to track the action back to a search query, keyword or ad, and 2) It becomes more difficult to see tangible improvement in the near-term. If you will be judging the performance of your AdWords account based on the number of phone calls, you need to have a reliable benchmark and plan on at least a 2-3 month test to gather statistically significant data on which to evaluate the new campaign. For additional information, see my article titled Telephone conversions.

I usually suggest using conversion tracking for actions a visitor from a search engine would realistically take within 30 days of visiting your website from an AdWords ad. That’s because, as a campaign manager, I want to get as much data as possible that indicates you have made a connection with a prospect. Therefore, I would typically want to track whether a visitor performed an action such as downloading a white paper or signing up for a newsletter, rather than if they purchased a $500 item. I suggest this because I will have a lot more data to work with.

Now back to the example of a 2% conversion rate. If your average CPC (Cost-Per-Click) is $1.00, you are paying about $50 for a conversion. If the initial conversion only produces a lead, then you still need to convert the lead to a sale, which will increas you cost per sale even further. Are those numbers realistic for your business? Can you live with the results? Only you can determine that. My job is to get the average CPC down as low as I can, while still getting qualified visitors. I do that by having lots of relevant keyword phrases with lower CPCs, having compelling, yet qualifying ad copy and using techniques to filter out unwanted impressions and clicks. There is a lot more to it, but these are the basics. If you want to get an idea of what the average CPC might be for some of your most popular keywords, go to SpyFu.com.

There are other factors to consider. Perhaps the most significant being the life-time value of a customer. Once you have acquired a customer, what is the likelihood of them buying from you again? How extensive is your offering? Really successful internet marketers can afford to lose money on the first sale because they have an extensive “back-end”. Meaning they have many other, more profitable products or services they can sell, once they have acquired the customer. If you don’t, then you can’t effectively compete with these advertisers.

Some industries are particularly vulnerable to this situation. It is particularly challenging in markets where the main keywords are relatively short, only 1-2 words, and the competition is fierce. Businesses such as computer repair, software development, locksmith and auto repair. It becomes particularly difficult if you are targeting a nation-wide audience because there is a lot of competition and you often compete with “lead brokers”. These are very skilled internet marketers that have fine-tuned their campaigns to operate on very thin margins.

Here is another challenge that occurs when your most popular keywords are short. It’s very difficult to maintain good quality scores, which means you are forced to bid higher. I consider anything “7/10” or above to be good. The reason is that these keywords tend to be quite broad, meaning lots of advertisers are bidding on them, and the overwhelming element of the quality score is “how the keyword performs across the entire Google system”. Unfortunately, this is something we have no control over. Although, there are tactics we can use that could help minimize this condition.

In summary, some advertisers face a unique set of challenges when it comes to making AdWords a successful channel, and quite often these advertisers tend to be smaller businesses with limited budgets and lack the experience and commitment necessary to perform an adequate market test. All the more reason to engage the services of a professional. If you only try making it work yourself and fail, you may never know if AdWords can actually work for you.

In this post I’ll be discussing the importance of conversion tracking and the options you have when your most desired response is a phone call from the prospect.

Direct-response marketing has been around for over 100 years, since the early days of catalog sales. Pre-internet, direct-response marketers were at the mercy of the postal system and the placement of “inquiry cards” appearing in catalogs or magazines. The cycle time for feedback on things such as ad copy, graphics or an item’s popularity was measured in months.

Conversion tracking is arguably the single most important feature of search engine marketing, simply because of how much it reduces the time it takes to receive feedback on many important aspects of the search engine marketing selling process; keywords, search terms, ad copy, landing pages, website features and functions, etc.

Most novice AdWords advertisers view conversion tracking as a nifty feature or simply a scorecard that provides interesting data and not as a valuable tool for optimizing campaign performance. If you aren’t willing to make conversion tracking a top priority, then you aren’t serious about optimizing your AdWords account! If you hire a professional to manage your AdWords account and you don’t have accurate, reliable conversion tracking in place, you have significantly hampered their ability to make significant improvements in your AdWords campaign.

But what if the most desired response from your website and the action most prospects take to your AdWords campaign is a phone call? Well then we have some real challenges.

Small business advertisers with limited budgets often judge the success of their AdWords campaign and the value of my work, by the number of qualified prospects that call them on the phone. In most cases, their evaluation time horizon is about one month, but sometimes it’s as short as a few days. This is a real challenge for me as well as the advertiser, to maximize their ROI.

Here is the typical scenario. A visitor clicks on your ad, visits your landing page, maybe a few other pages on your website and then decides to call you using the phone number posted on your website. The challenge we have is that the phone call cannot be traced back to the most important variables that make up your AdWords campaign; search queries, keywords, ad copy and landing pages. Simply asking the prospect how they found you and them saying Google or the internet, is not helpful from an AdWords account management perspective.

It reminds me of something my old employer Bill Hewlett said, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”. He was of course the co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, the world renowned electronic test & measurement company and by most considered to be the birthplace of what is now known as Silicon Valley.

When you are unable to associate the key elements of AdWords to the most desired action on your website, your ROI will suffer. Then it becomes a question of what your options are and how much are you willing to do?

I often encounter situations where a client or prospect has noticed an increase in calls due to their AdWords campaign, which is what they want of course, but they are concerned about costs. When I look at their campaign, what I see are mostly broad-matched keywords. When I analyze the search terms, I see a lot of what appears to be poor quality visitors, based on the search query that was used. The challenge is, we have no way of tying a search query or keyword to a phone call. Therefore, if I modify the existing campaign or build a new campaign based on what I believe are poor quality visitors, I’m sure to be filtering some prospects who would have called. The question is, how many good prospects called and how much did the advertiser have to pay to get that call.

In order to know what search queries or negative keywords to use, we need the ability to tie a search query to a phone call so we know what is working and what isn’t. You can’t rely on users to be all that precise when they use search engines. Sometimes they search for one thing, when they are really looking for something quite different or much more specific.

For example, suppose you only sold “tankless water heaters”. Do you want your ad to display to users searching for just “water heaters” or “tankless water heater repairs”? I actually had a client in that situation. When I told him he had paid for a lot of visitors (clicks) for that search query and asked him if he wanted to pay for clicks from these users in the future, his response was, “did they call me?”. Obviously I couldn’t tell him because we were not tracking phone calls, which is where 95% of his conversions (orders) came from.

So if you find yourself in a similar situation and you are not prepared to make an additional investment in third party tools, what are your options? Here are a few ideas to consider:

Filter what you believe to be poor quality visitors and know that some valid prospects will be missed.

If your budget will permit, use broad keywords to maximize exposure, but know that there will be a lot of poor quality visitors and your ROI will suffer.

If you can’t track the call to a keyword, at least be able to track the visitor through your website using Google Analytics. Identify a multi-step (clicks or pages) that are a natural path through the website that a qualified prospect would follow. Then use Google Analytics to record metrics such as bounce rate, number of pages visited, time on the website, etc.

Here is an example of how I do that. I have a vacation home I advertise exclusively on the internet. You can’t book my home from my website, although you can fill out an inquiry form. However, most interested prospects call me. I simply can’t get enough data based on successful completion of inquiry forms to optimize my AdWords campaign. So here is what I do.

I believe when a prospect comes to my website, first they look at pictures on the landing page. If they like what they see, they may go to the photo gallery. If they are still interested, they will check out my rate schedule and specials. If they’re still interested, they will check the availability calendar. That’s where I have my AdWords conversion tracking code! If they have made it to the availability calendar, I believe they are a qualified prospect and I can track that action all the way back to the search query, keyword, ad copy and landing page. I can check the bounce rate, pages visited and time on the website.

Let’s return to the scenario where most (>50%) of your leads or sales come from telephone calls and you can’t get enough relevant information from AdWords or Google Analytics. In that case, here are some options:

Implement meticulous phone answering practices to determine exactly how the caller found your phone number; not simply “the internet”, but a “Google search” and what specifically they were searching for.

Have a dedicated phone number that is only used on your website. The degree to which this can help depends on what percentage of visitors to your website come from your AdWords account verses other referrers such as organic search, email marketing, etc.

Use Google AdWords Call Extensions. There are a few different ways to implement this.

1.) Use Click-to-Call on ads appearing on mobile devices.

2.) Use Forwarding numbers to generate a unique number that appears below your ad. But please note, this number only appears in your ad, it won’t be displayed on your website, which is where I believe it really matters. I personally believe few people actually call a phone number that appears in an ad without first visiting the website, unless they are using a mobile device.

Implement a third-party tool that can actually track a phone call back to your AdWords campaign search query, keyword and ad copy. In fact, some even record the phone call so you can confirm the real quality of the call! These tools do exist and they are usually priced as a monthly service based on the total number of unique visitors to your website per day. One product I suggest you look at is Call Tracking Metrics.

In summary, if the most desired response from your website is a phone call from a prospect and you can’t rely on AdWords or Analytics data, you either have to invest somewhere (website functionality, procedures, technology) or be prepare to go flying blind and hope for the best.

When it comes to using Google search, meaning Google.com and their search partners, including search engines like AOL.com and ASK.com, Google is focused on one thing, creating the best experience possible so users will prefer their search engine over all others. To accomplish this, they build their algorithms to reward advertisers for one thing, relevance. How relevant is your keyword, ad copy, landing page and website to what the user is searching for? I discuss this in more detail in my article titled A chain of success.

When advertisers play by Google’s rules, meaning they build their AdWords campaigns and websites according to Google AdWords best practices, they are rewarded with things like; higher ad ranking, lower CPCs and more ad exposure. Google calls this Impression Share.

But what if there were relatively few searches for what you offer or if the best keyword for you (personal injury attorney) is extremely expensive? You might feel that if users saw your ad, even when searching for something else, there is a good chance they will be interested? Then what you are trying to do is known as interruption marketing or branding, which is quite different from direct-response search engine advertising, which by the way is the generic definition of Google AdWords search.

If that is the case, then what you are trying to accomplish runs completely counter to how Google search (organic or paid) is designed to work and you have some real challenges ahead of you. Just as an aside, interruption marketing is precisely what the Google display network is all about, but that’s a topic for another day. See my post titled Display network advertising.

Let me provide a quick example. You sell car insurance. This is a fiercely competitive market and in order to maintain a Cost-Per-Click you can afford, you want to advertise for related searches that are less costly, but still relevant to car insurance buyers. You know users are searching for a “Chevy Tahoe”, but you hope that when they see your ad for “Great deals on car insurance”, they will click on your ad, go to your website and request a quote for auto insurance. We call that a conversion.

The first step in this process is to create campaigns and optimize them according to Google’s best practices for the terms that you feel are most relevant to what you offer. In the example above, this would be for “car insurance”. This means creating campaigns and fine-tuning them to achieve a sustainable CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition) that you want. How you do this is basically how you master AdWords. When you do this, you will be taking the competition head-on. Not a trivial task for sure. This is basically what I do for clients every day.

Another quick sidebar, whether we are talking about the traditional way of building AdWords search campaigns or the non-traditional way I’ll be explaining, there is one important common thread. You must have accurate and reliable conversion tracking. Your ability to optimize your campaign will be directly related to how well you link a conversion back to the things you can control; keywords, matching options, ad copy, landing pages and website content. If you can’t do that, you are leaving a lot to chance. You are essentially flying blind and that’s not good.

In order to appreciate what I’m about to explain, you need to understand how Google has evolved over the past few years, since they went public and became accountable to Wall Street. Once they became a public company, they were expected to continually increase revenue and profits. By the way, Google AdWords accounts for 95% of Google’s profits. Google needed a way to drive up revenue, meaning click charges, in an equitable way. The method they used was to create a Quality Score. I call it Google’s profit dial because a relatively minor adjustment to the quality score algorithm can generate huge additional profits for Google.

Quality score is the part of Google’s algorithm that determines if your ad gets shown, when, where and how much a click costs you. The quality score has over 100 elements to it and Google is intentionally vague about how it works. It’s their secret sauce.

There simply isn’t any way around it. When it comes to Google search, you are bound by Google’s rules. If you are attempting to trick Google or the user, the best you can hope for is to simply stay in the game and get your ad shown as often as possible to qualified prospects who will be intrigued enough to click on your ad and convert. Staying in the game requires that you achieve a minimum level of performance for quality score, at least a score of 1. Anything higher is even better. A score of 0 and your ad does not see the light of day.

The degree to which you are able to obtain a higher quality score will determine how much impression share you receive and what your minimum bid must be. But there is a delicate balancing act required. You must maintain enough relevance in your ad copy and landing page to achieve minimum levels of quality, while at the same time being clear about what you offer. Relevance will determine how often your ad is displayed. The amount of competition will determine the keyword’s first page bid price and how truthful you are in the ad copy will have a major impact on your conversion rate.

The SNIM plan

Strategy – Display ads to users searching for related products or services, but not what you actually offer. Interrupt their search process with a related offer they can’t refuse. However, your ad must be relevant to what they are searching for.

Objective – Get as much impression share as you can, at the lowest CPC possible, but make sure the user is qualified. Quality score needs to be at least 3 and CTR is not critically important. However, a higher QS and CTR will produce better results.

Tactics

With just a few exceptions, the process for building campaigns for Search Network Interruption Marketing (SNIM) will be pretty much the same as it is for the search terms you want to compete head-on for. Meaning the search terms you want to get as close to 100% impression share, the highest quality scores and the best CTRs.

For the purpose of SNIM, the more keywords you have, the more exposure you get, and this is a game of exposure, but only at the right price.

Conversion tracking or some other similar tool that manages the campaign to CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) targets will significantly reduce the level of on-going effort.

Build and test ad groups to achieve the objectives mentioned above. If you plan to test Conversion Optimizer, have at least 30 days of history with as many conversions as possible. The more, the better.

Search terms – Determine what search terms you want your ad to display for. This requires a good understanding of the business, the business model, what is being offered, what makes a good or bad prospect and more. If the person setting up the campaign does not have a good understanding of this, it undermines the entire strategy.

Keywords – Use keywords and matching options that will display your ad for the desired search terms. Use negative keywords to filter poor quality visitors. Longer-tail keywords will produce less competition and higher quality scores, but be aware of what I call The keyword conundrum. Be careful of broad-matched keywords because they will trigger for “synonyms or related searches”. The more broad-matched keywords you can use, the more exposure you will get. Remember, the objective is broad exposure so the more keywords you have, the better.

Ad copy – Ad copy needs to first be relevant to the keyword and secondly be truthful about what the visitor will see when they click through. Use the keyword in the ad copy, preferably the headline and the display URL. Create ads that tell the visitor what they will find when they click on the ad. Be honest. The click does little good if the visitor doesn’t convert. This is a case where all you want is a CTR good enough to keep your ad showing at a good impression share.

Ad groups – Construct ad groups with common themes that link search terms to keywords, keywords to ad copy and ad copy to your custom landing page. Create ad groups around core words or phrases of similar value to the business. This is important because even though conversion optimizer is implemented at the campaign level, you set your CPA at the ad group level.

Campaigns – Create campaigns around groups containing keywords of similar value to your business. Use AdWords conversion tracking to optimize performance to the desired CPA targets. Campaigns with higher value traffic are worth more and you can afford to pay more for a conversion.

Landing page – use the keyword in the URL, h1 tag, headline and throughout the page.

Monitor the search queries to insure the traffic is relevant. Use negative keywords to filter poor quality traffic.

Things you need to know:

The devil is in the details. When this strategy is implemented properly it is a tedious and time-consuming process. There is a lot about what I have described that requires advanced knowledge of Google AdWords. This is not an advised course of action for the novice AdWords advertiser.

If you have an existing account that consists of many campaigns, ad groups and keywords, and is generating business, you need to be extremely careful not to do anything that can’t be easily undone or you could jeopardize the business.

If you have an existing account that is producing business and you don’t want to go through the time and expense of building and fine-tuning new campaigns, I suggest you simply focus on your search term reports and use negative keywords to filter the obviously poor quality traffic. This is far less costly to do and carries a lot less risk.

There are actually many different quality scores associated with your account. However, the only one you can see is associated with an individual keyword. If you have a preponderance of low quality scores, they will have an effect on the campaign where you are striving for higher marks. See my article titled The elephant in Google.

The AdWords Conversion Optimizer is a great tool when used properly. It uses historical conversion data to manipulate bid prices in real-time. However, when the historical data within the campaign indicates very little, if any correlation between the search query and a conversion, it makes it more difficult for CO to “learn” what works and what doesn’t. There is no guarantee CO will produce a better results than what you achieve by bidding manually.

In conclusion, I’d like to recognize that while this practice of SNIM runs counter to the fundamental intent of search advertising and Google AdWords, it is a viable advertising strategy and has produced enormous profits for advertisers who have done it successfully. But it is not to be entered into lightly. It will be a constant up-hill battle and you will remain at the mercy of Google and their ever-changing algorithms. Most noticeably, the quality score.

If you want your prospects to find your website when they use search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, there are two ways you can make that happen. The first way is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the other is called PPC (Pay-Per-Click).

The page you see immediately after you enter your search query and click the enter button is called a Search Engine Results Page or SERP. The listings at the top left are called “Ads” and the way you get your website listed there is by having a PPC advertising campaign using platforms such as Google AdWords and Bing Ads. The listing down the left side of the page, under the Ads are called “organic” or “natural” search results. The way you get your website listed here is by performing SEO.

There are pros and cons for each and a serious internet marketer will use both techniques to increase the chances of getting a prospect to visit their website. They want all the “real estate” they can on the SERP. Here are a few comparisons I think you might find interesting.

Cost

SEO – There is usually an up-front cost and then an on-going monthly cost. The cost variables have to do with the number of keywords and the amount of competition that exists for those keywords. The more competition there is for a keyword, the more work there is to perform; content creation and link building. It usually takes anywhere from 3-6 months to see the results you are looking for, meaning a first page ranking for your most important keywords.

The advantage of SEO is that once your webpage has been indexed by the search engines, you don’t pay anything when someone clicks on your listing and is taken to your website. This is particularly advantageous when you tend to get a lot of “shoppers” and relatively few conversions; i.e. a low conversion rate. Another example where SEO has an advantage is when you have a “long-tail” keyword, which gets the status of “Low search volume” in AdWords.

However, remember that it can take 3-6 months to achieve a first page ranking for your most important keywords and during those months you are still paying a monthly fee to the agency in addition to any up-front costs.

Your on-going cost is to keep your ranking or improve your ranking, as well as adding new keywords. If you don’t pay the on-going fee to maintain your rankings, your listing will begin to slip away. Here is an analogy I often use. SEO is like sitting in a boat with a hole in the bottom. As long as you keep bailing, you stay afloat. But the moment you stop bailing, you slowly sink out of sight.

I have spoken and worked with several SEO experts. Most people / agencies will not take on a new SEO client for less than $2,000 per month in fees. The point being, this investment is not to be entered into lightly. One misconception many business owners get caught in, is not understanding what keywords are actually valuable to their business and will deliver conversions. Most agencies, especially the ones who make unsolicited telemarketing calls to your business, will claim they can rank your website on the first page. Period. They won’t tell you for what keywords or they will only divulge keywords that are relatively easy to rank for. Buyer beware.

PPC – Some agencies charge an up-front fee and then a monthly maintenance fee. The monthly fee is derived from the monthly click charges (10-20%) or the number of keywords in your account or some other arbitrary amount.

This is where my business model is different than most other PPC agencies. I charge by the hour. See my article on How much will it cost for more information. With this type of a business model, it’s important to understand that most of the work that will be required to get you where you need to be, is done up front and therefore you need to be prepared for higher initial costs than you would otherwise see with a different business model, such as one that is based on ad spend.

Most companies who perform PPC management won’t tell you that if you design a PPC campaign correctly and perform the initial fine-tuning properly, it requires very little ongoing maintenance. This is one reason why I’m not a proponent of charging clients an ongoing monthly fee based on their ad spend or number of keywords. I do not want to be motivated by you having to spend more money. I want to be motivated by results and you being pleased with my work. And if for some reason, our efforts get sidelined due to unforeseen circumstances, you shouldn’t have to pay me for doing nothing. I have many clients I’ve not spoken with in over a year. During that period, they paid me nothing. Yet I was always available if they needed me.

Initial work required

SEO – There is a subtle difference in the way these two methods are performed. With SEO there is a presumption that you already know the keywords that will produce the best results. This is not necessarily a good assumption. How do you know what the best keywords for your business really are? What if the wrong keywords are chosen? You could waste a lot of time and money if you choose incorrectly! Also, the list of keywords is usually small compared with the number of keywords in a PPC campaign.

Generally speaking, the procedure for getting ranked organically has to do with two things; on-page and off-page characteristics. Ten years ago, getting ranked organically was mostly about on-page factors. Today it’s only about 10% on-page and 90% off-page. The number of keywords for a small business SEO campaign is about 5-25.

On-page refers to the content and meta data on any given page. Although meta data is becoming less important as search engines get smarter. The more content you have relating to a specific keyword phrase, the higher your rank will be for that page. Off-page refers to other websites that link to your website. The best scenario being a hypertext link with the text being the actual keyword you want to get ranked for (known as anchor-text), coming from a website that has a higher page rank (PR) than your website, and without a reciprocal link from your website back to the other website.

PPC – With PPC, determining the keywords that deliver the best performance is an inherent part of the process. Keywords that don’t perform well are deleted or have their bids reduced and keywords that produce better results are bid into higher positions.

A significant portion of the work done to build a PPC campaign is keyword research. Various tools are used to identify words and phrases prospects use to search for your products. However, if a client has an existing campaign, even if it was under-performing, it can be a virtual treasure chest of valuable information. When you consider all the different keyword matching options and the use of negative keywords, the total number of keywords in a small business PPC campaign can be a few hundred to as many as a few thousand. In my own AdWords account I have fewer than 50 keywords, but well over 5,000 negative keywords!

On-going work required

With both SEO and PPC, the ranking of your listing is determined by a computer program called an algorithm. These algorithms are always changing and these changes will affect the rank of your listing or ad. An astute account manager will be on top of these changes and adjust your campaigns accordingly.

SEO – Because the amount of work required for each keyword involves creating several paragraphs, if not several pages of content, as well as link building, there is a constant backlog of keywords to work on. In addition, one of the critical elements of the SEO ranking algorithm is the age of the content. It is critical that the agency constantly update the content associated with every keyword or the rank will begin to fall.

PPC – Once the keyword research has been done, the campaigns, ad groups and ad copy have been developed and launched, the process of what I call “fine-tuning” begins. One important misconception many business owners have is the importance of the fine-tuning process. I estimate the amount of work required to get a PPC campaign to a mature state is about 60/40% in favor of fine-tuning. The more keywords in the account, the more work will be required.

Some keywords are clearly more important than others. In addition, an astute account manager will undergo a process of ad copy split-testing. Ad copy is so significant it can make a 50% difference in the CTR for any given keyword. Generally, I will go through 3-4 rounds of split-testing for each ad group before arriving at the one that remains.

Time frame

SEO – Most agencies will tell you it will take 3-6 months to achieve a first page ranking for your best keywords. The time required to actually perform a good portion of the work may only take a few days, but you are at the mercy of the search engines indexing schedule to see a change in the ranking.

PPC – Depending on how the agency schedules their work, it should only take a few days to begin to see results once the work begins, but it varies greatly from one client to another. Depending on the implementation schedule, number of keywords and the amount of traffic, it will take additional time to bid each keyword into the appropriate ad position and uncover new negative keywords not found in the development phase.

Metrics & tracking results

How do you know if your investment in search engine marketing is paying off? What is the ROI?

SEO – There is nothing inherent in SEO that answers this question, although most agencies provide reports that show where your website ranks for specific keywords. But where is the beef? How many new leads or sales did you get for the money you spent on SEO? In order to answer that question you will need a separate application such as web analytics or a shopping cart application. Something that can tie a specific visit from a search engine visitor to a meaningful action on your website. This action is generally called a conversion. If you don’t have some mechanism to perform this function then you are doing little more than rolling the dice and hoping something good will happen.

PPC – The entire PPC campaign management exercise is devoted to measuring results and making adjustments to improve performance. All major PPC service providers include conversion tracking as a standard feature. However, it is up to the website owner to create meaningful actions visitors can take on their website and install the conversion tracking code properly. One issue I see all too often is how an advertiser has implemented conversion tracking in AdWords. They tend to use it more like a scorecard than an optimization tool. See my article titled PPC Implementation Strategies for more information.

In addition to conversion tracking, there are other useful metrics that can be used to determine how well your campaign is performing. These include things such as Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for keywords and ad copy, Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and search term quality.

Flexibility & responsiveness

SEO – There is an inherent lag time because you are at the mercy of the search engines ability to find the content on your website or on another website that links to yours. This makes it difficult to change the way your listing reads and your ability to add new keywords (products & services). This can be especially challenging if you deal in seasonal items.

PPC – Ad copy can be changed and new keywords can be introduced in a matter of minutes. Entire campaigns can be turned on and off like a light switch. Campaigns, can be set to run at any time of the day or night, and any day of the week.

Risks

Unless you are an expert in SEM yourself, you will be entrusting your on-line reputation and investment to the agency you chose. This comes with a certain amount of risk that you should be aware of.

SEO – Remember I mentioned that your ranking is determined by computer programs called algorithms? These algorithms are the search providers secret sauce and they go to great lengths to keep them a secret and to insure that ingenious individuals don’t use nefarious practices to game the system. Otherwise known as “black hat techniques“. These techniques may catapult your ranking in the short run, but if detected by the search providers, could get your website banned from future search results! Many innocent companies have awakened to find themselves out of business online because of the actions of an unscrupulous SEO consultant.

PPC – There are also rules and guidelines for creating PPC campaigns, but breaking the rules usually results in the temporary suspension of a keyword, ad group or individual ad. As with SEO, blatant failure to adhere to Google’s policies will result in account suspension and eventual banning from the AdWords program.

Perhaps the biggest risk with PPC is whether it ultimately produces a profit. Just as with SEO, you have professional fees to create and manage your account. But with PPC you have the added expense of click charges.

There is no guarantee that PPC will work for every product and every business. There must be enough profit margin in any given sale to cover the costs of your campaign, just to break even. This is where I’d like to borrow a very good model coined the Tactical Triangle, from my friend Perry Marshall. I describe it in my post titled PPC Essentials. If you have any question as to whether AdWords will work for your product or service, you must read this post.

If you are serious about knowing if it will work for you, then you need to be prepared to make a commitment to perform an adequate test. The cost to perform the test is determined by the amount of agency fees and click charges. I recommend you budget 300-500 clicks to perform an adequate test. To get a feel for the amount of consulting fees, see my article on How much will it cost.

Location targeting

This refers to your ability to include or exclude visitors to your website from search engines based on where the searcher is located.

SEO – It is not possible to geographically target your ad using SEO, unless you add a geographic qualifier in every keyword, such as “dallas widgets” versus simply “widgets”. When you optimize your website, you are optimizing for the entire country and competing with everyone else for the same keyword phrase. How many surrounding towns would you have to include if you were to geographically qualify every important keyword with every town you wanted to serve? That said, search engines, like Google.com are getting better at knowing where the user is when they search. This is becoming a bigger and bigger factor in whose ad is displayed for any given search.

PPC – If your business serves a local market, you can use campaign location targeting that is as precise as a few miles. AdWords is also smart enough that if for example you targeted your campaign to just Dallas, TX with the keyword widgets, it would also display your ad to someone in Los Angeles searching for Dallas widgets.

Compelling ad copy

I’m talking about how effective the words are that appear on the search results page. Do they create a compelling reason to click on your listing versus your competitor?

SEO – The search results from an organic search (the results that are produced from SEO) often contain text which is sub-optimal from a marketing perspective, unless you have a very competent SEO person. Searchers often see sentence fragments with less than compelling text. The listing is typically a portion of your meta “description tag”.

PPC – With PPC the advertiser has a great deal of flexibility with the ad copy. It can be tested, tracked and modified in a matter of minutes to improve performance.

Ranking

SEO – SEO firms always talk about being “on the first page” and most search results pages have 5-10 organic listings. Agencies will feel as though they have been successful even if your listing is at the bottom of the page, “below the fold”, meaning the searcher is required to scroll down to see the listing.

Ninety percent of searchers don’t look beyond the first page and 60% don’t even scroll down the page. The idea of being in the top three positions is usually very difficult for popular keywords.

PPC – The whole process around PPC is based on maximizing ROI (Return On Investment), so given that ad ranking has a lot to do with the cost per click (CPC), ad rank is very important and unique to each keyword.

For my own PPC campaign, I have some keywords I want to rank in position two or three and others I want to appear in position five or six. When you pay by the click, you look at every keyword as if it were an employee. Some employees are more valuable to your business and therefore you pay them more.

Modifications to your website

This refers to the need to actually modify your existing website to improve the campaign performance.

SEO – Earlier I described the initial work required to perform SEO. A big part of performing SEO has to do with modifying and creating new content. Therefore, you will need to give the SEO firm access to your website. One classic challenge you face with SEO is that the copy that the search engines like doesn’t usually appeal to prospects. It just doesn’t sound natural or provide compelling sales copy.

PPC – No website modifications are necessary to have a PPC campaign. However, that’s not to say that your campaign can’t be improved by making website modifications. One of the important elements of the quality score algorithm is landing page quality. Landing page quality has to do with the relevance between the keyword, ad copy and the content of the landing page. For example, if your keyword is “apples”, then Google wants to see the word apples in your ad and content on your landing page that’s all about apples and not oranges or fruit.

Building a successful PPC campaign is an on-going process. In almost every case I get to the point with a client where the biggest inhibitor is the website. It might be that it needs customized landing pages that are highly relevant to the keyword and ad copy or the website needs a facelift because it doesn’t sell as effectively as it could. However, these are the very same characteristics that would affect the performance of an SEO campaign.

Market conditions and cost

In some markets it’s very difficult to differentiate yourself in an ad or description line. The result is that users tend to do a lot of shopping, meaning they scan many websites before digging deeper and often return to a site several times during the evaluation phase.

SEO – This has an advantage for SEO because the advertiser is not paying per click. The visitor can click on the listing till their heart’s content and it has no financial consequence to the advertiser. See my article titled The ascension model.

PPC – When the advertiser pays per click, you want a visitor to click on your ad only once and never leave. This is why it’s always a good idea to have a prominent “Bookmark this page” button on your most popular pages.

In many ways, the ability to create the optimal PPC campaign is based on factors you may not have been thinking about. Most notably is your website design, but other factors include:

How competitive your market is, relative to your budget.

How your most important keywords have performed across the entire Google system. Yes, your competitors performance for those same keywords is a major component. This has a significant impact on your keyword quality scores and quality score is the biggest factor in determining what you pay per click.

Local advertisers with smaller markets and less traffic, find it difficult to break through the system-wide quality scores.

Your larger competitors with deeper pockets can afford to spend more and take a longer-term view.

The lifetime value of a customer will determine how much you can afford to pay to acquire a new customer.

What is the action you want your “visitor from search” to take? Is it a lead or a sign-up that doesn’t require anything more than a first name and email address or is it a $300 sale?

Do you have actions visitors can take within the next 30 days, which we can tract, that indicate you are connecting with visitors? If you don’t, you will find it difficult to know what keywords and ad copy are working and which aren’t.

These and other factors will play a large part in achieving your goals, yet they are beyond what a campaign manager can control.

But let’s focus on your website because it’s so important.

In an ideal world, you would build your website with the visitor from search in mind and optimize your website, especially your landing pages, specifically for that type of visitor. You would begin by understanding what I call the “search vocabulary” of your niche markets. These are the words and phrases prospects use when they shop for products and services using search engines. Google calls them search terms or search queries. Not to be confused with keywords. And they might very well be terms you wouldn’t have thought of and don’t appear anywhere on your current website.

Visitors from search are a unique kind of prospect. They tend to be cynical, skeptical and have very little patience. From the moment they arrive at your landing page, you have 3-5 seconds to make a connection with them. If you don’t, they will “bounce” and probably will not be coming back. How you create landing pages that are optimized for visitors from search, is called conversion optimization. Examples of actions that can be tracked in AdWords are discussed further down this page.

But let’s focus on the search vocabulary and how it relates to your website design. To do this I need to introduce you to a new term called the “search continuum”. It refers to how users search for products and services as they move through the phases of seeking information to shopping and then ultimately buying. Ideally, you want to pay for one click from any given visitor and then they buy from you. Unfortunately, it seldom works that way, especially with search marketing where you have no previous established relationship with the prospect.

Unless you are willing to make a considerable investment in a website make-over, having the right AdWords strategy has a lot to do with how your website is designed. I’d like to provide a generic example to make the point.

The information seeker who is early in the search continuum, uses generic search queries such as “wagons”. At this point, they want to know what they look like, how they are used and perhaps ball park pricing.

The shopper uses search queries that are a bit more refined, such as “wagons for kids”. This user wants to know who makes wagons for kids, what are they made of, what specific products are available and some comparison shopping information, preferably from multiple manufacturers and distributors.

The buyer users search queries such as “American Flyer AF-2307”. This prospect is very close to purchasing and will be more interested in price, availability, shipping costs and service after the sale.

Each of these three scenarios imply very different conversations with your prospect and therefore very different landing pages and website content. If your website is very product oriented, with pages of detailed specifications and you only represent one supplier, then you shouldn’t be using keywords indicative of the information seeker and perhaps not even the shopper. If you do, you may wind up turning off the visitor or at a minimum, paying for that visitor to click on your ad several times as they move through the search continuum. Your focus should be on prospects much further in the search continuum who are very close to making a purchase.

For another perspective on this same basic issue, read my article titled PPC essentials.

The degree to which a PPC campaign is implemented will be dependent on several factors, which may or may not be economically or technically feasible for your company. Certain aspects of the campaign management will be performed based on the level of experience and tools the campaign manager has at their disposal. However, in many cases, especially for companies who only have a basic website and a minimal budget for internet marketing, even the best campaign manager will be limited in what they can do, especially when it comes to producing tangible results in the short run.

Successful search engine advertising is focused on one very important factor; Return on Investment (ROI) and the primary tool used to calculate ROI is called Conversion tracking. A conversion takes place when a visitor to your website is able to take some meaningful action which can be measured and monetized.

If you have no meaningful actions visitors can take that can be tied back to a specific keyword, then you need to construct your campaign and adjust your expectations accordingly. For example, if the action you are looking for from your PPC campaign is to have a prospect call you on the phone, it will take longer to know if your campaign is producing the results you are hoping for and it will be more difficult to optimize.

John Wanamaker’s famous 1886 quote sums it up very well:

“I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted…
…I just don’t know which half!”

A good campaign manager will begin with a thorough analysis of your web site to determine what, if any visitor actions can be monitored to begin the process of establishing ROI based advertising. In many cases, some important actions already exist, even if it is only the action of visiting a specific page on the site. Other actions may be able to be added without much difficulty or expense such as creating a printable coupon. The ultimate action is to have a visitor actually buy something on your site! However, that implies that your site is capable of e-commerce, which most small businesses that are not web-based, simply are not set up to do.

Here are some ideas for actions that can be tracked and used to help establish ROI:

Visiting a specific page on your site

Sign up for a mini email course

Downloading a white paper or application

Playing a video clip

Take a poll

Sign up for a newsletter

Print a coupon

Listen to an audio clip

Fill out a “contact us” form

Sign up for a conference call

Sign up to receive a series of emails on a particular topic

Submit a question

Make a call

Register / Sign-up for an event

Email to a friend

Buy something!!!!

These are all actions which indicate that you have connected with the visitor and you are beginning a relationship, and these actions can be traced back to specific keywords, search terms and ads. Now you have empirical data to know what’s working!

Once you and your campaign manager have decided what your site is capable of, web analytics should to be installed. Website analytics allows the tracking of visitor movements and actions while on your site. In addition, they tell you lots of other useful information that can help fine tune your campaign for greater efficiency and improved ROI.

Suppose your friendly Yellow Pages salesperson said to you, “I’m willing to put any ad you want on as many pages as you want, and the only time you have to pay me is when someone goes to your website”.

Would you be interested in a deal like that? Well, that is what Pay-Per-Click advertising is like. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and is delivered to your web site. And remember what the Yellow Pages salesperson said about “on as many pages as you like”? Well, today if you advertise in the Yellow Pages, you are probably under one or maybe two categories or headings. With Search Engine Marketing, you can be under as many “categories” as you feel are appropriate for your business. These are called “keywords” or “keyword phrases”.

Perhaps a question & answer forum will help…

“But I already pay someone do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make sure I am highly ranked for my keywords. ”If they are doing SEO, then here are some things to consider:

Making your website “search engine friendly” is not the same as search engine optimization. There is a really big difference.

Your SEO campaign is probably limited to a relatively small number of keywords that are applicable to your business. PPC offers an unlimited number of keywords.

What is displayed in the search results is likely a chopped up collection of words from a page on your site. It isn’t a compelling marketing message with a call to action that SELLS!

It typically takes 3-6 months for the search engines to identify any changes to your site and then “re-index” your site for the new keywords. Changing or adding keywords with PPC takes a matter of minutes.

If your serve a national market, then using SEO in conjunction with PPC is a viable strategy. However, if you are a small business serving a local market then SEO alone is limited in what it will do for you. For example, you can’t geographically target the audience unless you include the name of the city in the keyword. If you perform SEO on the keyword “real estate agent”, you are “optimizing” for the entire country and competing against everyone else who optimizes for that keyword.

If your employee or contractor is using techniques the search engines forbid, your site could get permanently banned! For many businesses, their brand, company name or web site URL, is very valuable to them and loosing the ability to be found using a search engine would have a traumatic effect on their on-line presence.

“Why can’t my IT person or web developer do this?”

I can’t count the number of times a prospect has come to me after they have let their web developer create and manage their AdWords account. In most cases the person was very good at web development and said, “sure, I know how to use AdWords”. The thing is, AdWords is deceptively simply, but devilishly complex. Almost anyone with basic computer skills can open an AdWords account and drive traffic to a website. However, doing it in a way that produces an optimal ROI is quite another thing. But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume her or she….

Has some knowledge of search engine marketing

Has some experience with Pay-Per-Click

Has extensive experience with the major search engine paid search programs and is up-to-date

Has the software tools necessary to perform the keyword research and on-going maintenance

Has done the research to know what keywords will perform well in your industry, in your industry segment and in your local area

Has the time to devote to this effort on a priority basis

Then assuming they have other duties and their time has value, you will probably be paying them more than I would charge. And if they are not at least as effective as I am, you won’t be getting a good return on your investment!

“Where will my ad appear and what will it look like?” While I work with several different “search providers”, by far the most effective is Google AdWords. If you go to www.Google.com and search for a product or service, you will be able to see in a pink shaded area on the top and down the right-hand side of the screen, a list of “Ads”. This is where your ad would appear. Try it, and see what it looks like. Google is the most popular search engine and your ad could appear for as many keywords as you would like.

If you are reading this article you have either made the decision to significantly restructure your AdWords account or you are seriously considering it.

Chances are, you are doing this because your account suffers from what I call the broad match effect. The purpose of this article is to prepare you for the journey we will be on as we transition from your current account structure to the new one.

Making any change to your AdWords account involves some degree of risk. AdWords is an extremely complex and dynamic system. If you allow me to restructure your account, there will be certain risks, but the risk is minimized because we know:

what the problem is,

what to do about it,

what the result will be and

what to expect during the transition.

I want to elaborate on this because there will be short-term setbacks and long-term ramifications. You may see some alarming performance data during the transition. Some of this performance data is real and represents actual short-term and long-term higher costs and some of it is not as real, just misleading.

The real part comes two factors; higher CPC associated with more restrictive keyword matching options and from the fact that we will be reestablishing quality scores for keywords and ad copy. Yes, ad copy has a quality score, you just can’t see it like you can for keywords, but it is real and it does have an impact on performance. Finding the balance of ad quality and optimal ad CTR is tricky business and can only be accomplished through testing. In addition, I recommend giving your Max CPC bids a boost in the early going to establish a higher CTR. As you know, the biggest component of keyword quality score is CTR.

Here is a graphic I created to illustrate how keyword matching options effect your CPC, exposure and quality of visitors.

This is a an alarming reality for some advertisers and you should be prepared to spend 50-500% more CPC when you make this Major Chance to your campaign structure!

The part which is not so obvious is your cost per conversion. Because conversion tracking uses a 30-day cookie, cost/conv data for any given keyword on any given day will change based on newly registered conversions. That’s because conversions and transactions get attributed to the date of the click (on your ad), not the date the conversion occurred.

Here is something for you to think about. If you want to know the effect a change you make today has on cost/conv, you need to wait at least sixty days and then look back thirty days. Otherwise you will be dealing with incomplete and misleading data. You need to resist evaluating the new campaign based on short-term data. Also keep in mind that the number of impressions and clicks can vary considerably from day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month. You must be willing to have the necessary confidence, commitment and patience or you should not be doing this.

Depending on your market, conversion tracking data can increase many fold over the life of the cookie, as visitors return to your site (from non-AdWords links) and convert. I make the distinction, “from non-AdWords links”, such as a bookmark, organic listing or website referrals, because AdWords attributes the conversion to the last-clicked ad, keyword and search term, even if the keyword or ad is paused.

I make the point about paused keywords because you will continue to register conversions in your account from keywords in your old campaigns, which may be paused, and you probably won’t be looking at those keywords when we launch the new campaign(s).

The broad-match wild card effect – With all the down-side of using broad-matched keywords, there is one positive aspect worth mentioning, and it can be significant.

The fact is that some search queries can only trigger ads using broad-matched keywords. Unless you have spent considerable time pouring through server logs and search term reports, you probably don’t realize just how many possible unique search queries there are for your broad-matched keywords. It’s essentially unlimited. Some of them are great and some are dogs. The dogs are why you have been racking up all those relatively poor quality impressions and clicks. But notice just how many of those strange ones produced conversions! Chances are that those strange search terms will not trigger your ad with anything other than a broad-matched keyword. If you tried to target that same search query with a more targeted keyword match type, you would almost certainly be given a status of Low search volume.

Here is something else to consider. When you use broad-matched keywords, you become eligible for a very large number of ad auctions. At the time of the ad auction, only a fraction of those eligible, actually get displayed. There are so many dynamic factors at play, that it becomes unpredictable, especially when you have an unusual search query. I call this the broad-match wildcard effect. While you might be very happy that your ad was displayed for a particular search query, it will be impossible to insure that it will be displayed the next time that search query is performed.

While we will try to create keywords and matching options that display your ad for as many relevant search queries as possible, there is only so much we can do. We don’t have complete control over the AdWords system and it isn’t 100% predictable. Therefore, if we use more restrictive keyword match types, you must be willing to accept the fact that we will not be able to display your ad for every conceivable search query. If your logs indicate that you have received a significant number of conversions from search queries that we cannot reliably link to a keyword in the new design, we should not implement a completely new design. A partial redesign, focusing on a segment of the account or campaign may be in order.

The importance of fine-tuning – Most advertisers can’t appreciate the importance of or the amount of time required to fine-tune a campaign once it’s been launched. No one ever get’s everything right when the campaign is first launched.

When the initial campaign is launched, default bid prices are used, which amount to little more than a guess as to what the bid price should be in order to receive the desired ad ranking for each keyword. It’s simply not practical to research bid prices for a large number of keywords prior to launch. In the beginning it will be necessary for me to monitor and make adjustments at least once a day and then it tails off over time. The amount of time this requires depends on the number of keywords, ad groups and campaigns in your account.

Each keyword is unique and is actually a “market” unto itself. Therefore, until the keyword is actually searched on and your ads receive “clicks”, you can’t be sure where your ad will appear in the ranking or how much you need to bid to obtain the rank that is appropriate. Some keywords are simply much more valuable to you than others. It is an iterative process and the two most important factors are 1) how much traffic your campaign receives and 2) how much time I have to work on it. Some of my clients have made a serious mistake by not allowing me to perform the fine-tuning process once the new campaign is launched or they underestimate the amount of work required to perform this important task.

Before we begin the transition, I recommend that you implement Google Analytics. It offers data you won’t see in AdWords, such as bounce rate, number of pages per visit, % new visitors and average time on site. These are all valuable pieces of data that help us establish relative values for specific keywords, ad copy and web pages. In addition, you can set up “goals”, which are like conversions. But unlike the AdWords 30-day cookie, the Google Analytics cookie can last up to two years! This can help give us a more accurate cost/conv.

So let’s review why you might want to incur the additional expense of redesigning your AdWords account and seemingly subject yourself to the risk.

The characteristics I describe in the broad match effect, implies you don’t have the desired control over what’s going on in your AdWords account. You aren’t able to control what ad a user sees for any given search query, your ads are being shown for irrelevant searches (unwanted impressions), you are paying for a lot of poor quality visitors and you are spending a lot of time making changes to your account without any real confidence you know what you are doing. You’re doing stuff like; ad copy changes, new keywords, experimenting with keyword matching options, adding a lot of negative keywords and changing bid prices. Probably not the best use of your time.

The answer is, you will get:

Better search query to ad copy relevance

Higher CTR

Higher quality scores

Lower CPC

Lower cost/conv

Fewer unwanted impressions

Higher CTR

Lower CPC

Lower cost/conv

Fewer unwanted clicks

Lower ad spend

Lower cost/conv

Easier on-going account maintenance

Lower costs

Less of your time

Better ROI

The confidence in knowing what’s actually happening

Frees you up to focus on other things

The confidence in knowing you are in control

Freedom to try new things

A happier life 🙂

One final word of caution. You have probably come to the realization that the new account design I discussed is pretty involved. Well, you’re right. Therefore, if you or anyone else make changes to the new campaign, chances are they will do more harm than good. It would be like hiring someone to tune your baby grand piano and then making a few minor adjustments on your own! Not a good idea.